【英文】花旗银行报告：元宇宙与货币（184页）

英文研究报告 2022年05月31日 07:10 管理员

In the early 2000s, Second Life offered a virtual world for users to hang out together and buy/sell virtual items to each other without any goals or objectives; depicting a “proto-Metaverse” in the words of Matthew Ball. However, it failed to see mass adoption as it was complex, restricted to PC-only, two dimensional, and pre-dated enabling technologies. By contrast, gaming environments like Roblox (2004) and Fortnite (2017) boast hundreds of millions of users and offer users goals and objectives to achieve in a virtual gaming environment. Popular discussion around the “Metaverse” exploded in October 2021, as highlighted by Google Trends data. Similarly, mentions of the term Metaverse took off in U.S. company filings and earnings calls around November 2021 and remains at elevated levels today. At a corporate level, the spike in interest was led by landmark announcements including the late October 2021 rebranding of Facebook as Meta Platforms. At a popular culture level, growth of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) was fed by the increasing involvement of artists, actors, athletes, and other celebrities (some as paid sponsors) in the space.

The Metaverse is partly a dream of the future of the internet and partly a way to encapsulate current trends in online infrastructure, including the growth of real-time 3D worlds. VR and AR technology specifically should benefit many sectors, resulting in potentially more efficient processes, enhanced training, and improved collaboration. Gaming is viewed as a key Metaverse use case for the next several years due to the current immersive and multi-player experience of the space. But we believe the Metaverse will eventually help us find new and enhanced ways to do all of our current activities, including commerce, entertainment and media, education and training, manufacturing, and enterprise in general. In the coming years, we expect it to include internal collaboration, client contact, sales and marketing, advertising, events and conferences, engineering and design, and workforce training among other activities.